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What Is Hezbollah's Position on Israel?

The Central Press Office of Hezbollah wrote in an entry on its website titled "Hezbollah: Identity and Goals" (accessed May 25, 2004 webpage using Archive.org on Feb. 21, 2012:

"It was not by sheer coincidence that Hezbollah turned into a struggle movement against the 'Israeli' occupation. Because Hezbollah's ideological ideals sees no legitimacy for the existence of 'Israel.'"

Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General of Hezbollah, was quoted in a Fall 2002 article titled "The Return of Hizbullah" in Middle East Quarterly, as having said:

"One of the central reasons for creating Hizbullah was to challenge the Zionist program in the region. Hizbullah still preserves this principle, and when an Egyptian journalist visited me... and asked me if the destruction of Israel and the liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem were Hizbullah's goal, I replied: 'That is the principal objective of Hizbullah, and it is no less sacred than our [ultimate] goal. The generation that lived through the creation of this entity is still alive. This generation watches documentaries and reads documents that show that the land was conquered was called Palestine, not Israel. We face an entity that conquered the land of another people, drove them out of their land, and committed horrendous massacres. As we see, this is an illegal state; it is a cancerous entity and the root of all the crises and wars and cannot be a factor in bringing about a true and just peace in this region. Therefore, we cannot acknowledge the existence of a state called Israel, not even far in the future, as some people have tried to suggest."

[Editor's Note: Nasrallah was also quoted in a Dec. 31, 1999 speech at a Hezbollah rally in Beirut (reprinted in the Associated Press), as having said: "There is no solution to the conflict in this region except with the disappearance of Israel. Peace settlements will not change reality, which is that Israel is the enemy and that it will never be a neighbor or a nation. Peace will not wipe out the memory of the massacres it [Israel] has committed... And on this last day of the century, I promise Israel that it will see more suicide attacks, for we will write our history with blood."]

Hassan Ezzedin, Chief Spokesman for Hezbollah, as quoted in an Oct. 14, 2002 interview titled "In the Party of God: Are Terrorists in Lebanon Preparing for a Larger War?" in the New Yorker, said:

"Our goal is to liberate the 1948 borders of Palestine. The Jews who survive this war of liberation can go back to Germany, or wherever they came from. The Jews who lived in Palestine before 1948 will be allowed to live as a minority and they will be cared for by the Muslim majority."

"The Necessity for the Destruction of Israel
We see in Israel the vanguard of the United States in our Islamic world. It is the hated enemy that must be fought until the hated ones get what they deserve. This enemy is the greatest danger to our future generations and to the destiny of our lands, particularly as it glorifies the ideas of settlement and expansion, initiated in Palestine, and yearning outward to the extension of the Great Israel, from the Euphrates to the Nile.

Our primary assumption in our fight against Israel states that the Zionist entity is aggressive from its inception, and built on lands wrested from their owners, at the expense of the rights of the Muslim people. Therefore our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated. We recognize no treaty with it, no cease fire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated.

We vigorously condemn all plans for negotiation with Israel, and regard all negotiators as enemies, for the reason that such negotiation is nothing but the recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Therefore we oppose and reject the Camp David Agreements, the proposals of King Fahd, the Fez and Reagan plan, Brezhnev's and the French-Egyptian proposals, and all other programs that include the recognition (even the implied recognition) of the Zionist entity."